Dealers of Lightning (12 page)

He did, however, know one person who boasted a first-rate familiar­ity with the Young Turks of the new discipline: Bob Taylor.

Pake had met Taylor in 1964, back when Washington University under­took an unusual rescue operation for Wes Clark, the MIT computer pio­
neer. Among
Clark's idiosyncrasies
was a
visceral antipathy
to
the concept
of
time-sharing. ("I'm one of the
oldest
continuing floating objectors in
the business," he once told an
interviewer.)
Time-sharing, he
believed,
encouraged institutions like universities
to
lust after grander and costlier
machines tiiat were by their nature
inefficient
for the small-scale
work
students and professors typically
did. Their
only virtue
was that they
could
be paid off by overcharging
every user
for his or her time-slice
of
the
entire behemoth, no matter
how much
of it the user actually
employed. Thus was computing
rendered more
remote
and
intimidating
than
ever—a backwards trend exemplified
in
Clark's view by the arche­typal system at
MIT:
"That of
a very large
International
Business
Machine
in a tightly sealed
Computation Center:
The
computer
not as
tool,
but as
demigod."
What Clark
found even
more troubling
was that
subdividing the main processor,
as time-sharing
did, rendered impossible
the sort of display-based research
that Ivan
Sutherland had achieved
so
spectacularly on the TX-2.
No user of a
time-shared computer could
ever
monopolize the processor
long enough to
drive a coherent visual
display as Sutherland had.
(Clark allowed the TX-2 to
be
shared,
but only
serially—you signed up for a block of time on it, but during that
period
the entire machine was yours.)
Time-sharers were
limited to communi­
cating
with their machines
via teletype, because
the sluggish
rate
at
which people typed was what gave
the system
the necessary opportuni­ties to shift its attention from one
customer to
another
between
key­
strokes.

Clark thought computer science would
be
better served
by
jumping
directly to single-user machines, even if
that
meant temporarily mak­ing
do with
underpowered computers.
"He
would talk about
how
it
was not going to be too many years before
we
would have
a
computer
you
could
hold in your hand," recalled
Severo
Ornstein,
a PARC
engi­neer who was one of Clark's longtime associates.
"At
that time comput­ers were filling buildings larger than this one—a single computer.
But
he said,
'Yeah,
you'll just paint 'em on your desk, just like that.'
So
a lot
of us
felt that time-sharing was an enormous waste."

Starting in 1962 Clark underscored his conviction by designing and
building the legendary
"LINC."
(Its name stood for "Laboratory Instru­ment Computer" but echoed the name of its birthplace, MIT's Lincoln
Lab.) The LINC was unique for its time in that it could be operated by a
single user from a desk-sized console, aldiough its processor and memory
were housed in a wardrobe-sized unit typically concealed in a nearby
closet. Designed specifically to serve biomedical research rather than as
a general-purpose machine—which helped keep it compact—the LINC
"was the first machine that you could take apart and put in the back of
your car, carry somewhere else, put back together again, and it would
run," Ornstein recalled. "That idea had never previously seemed con­ceivable."

But the machine was almost too fascinating. It attracted the interest
of the National Institutes of Health, which in 1964 offered MIT the
unprecedented sum of $37 million to establish around the LINC an
inter-university program of computer-aided biomedical research. The
scent of money attracted MIT's academic mandarins to a project they
had previously relegated to the fringes of the research departments,
which Clark preferred anyway. He did not relish seeing his own pro­gram coming under the academic establishments thumb. Obstreper­ous to the last, he flatly refused to cooperate, forcing the exasperated
university to abruptly withdraw its support for the entire venture.

For the next few weeks Clark frantically canvassed the country to find
a new home for the machine and the dozen junior researchers whose
livelihoods and careers depended on it. Washington University, which
was trying to build both a medical school and a digital computing pro­gram, saw opportunity in MIT's pique, not to mention the chance to turn
the tables on a big East Coast institution by raiding
it
for a change. A few
days before his scheduled eviction from Lincoln Lab, Clark looked up
from his desk. A stranger in spectacles was standing in the office, stam­mering out a transparent stoiy about "just happening" to be passing
through Cambridge en route to an engagement in Woods Hole. It was
George Pake, come to check Clark out on the recommendation of a
mutual friend. Before returning to St. Louis a few days later, he agreed to
give Clark's project a permanent home at Washington University, where
it was to obtain further funding through one Bob Taylor, at ARPA.

Pake and Taylor each came away from this initial interaction favorably
disposed toward the other. Pake was impressed by Taylor’s excellent
contacts within the computing fraternity and his apparent authority to
disburse millions of dollars with a minimum of fuss. (Formally speak­ing, Taylor was still Ivan Sutherland's deputy at the time.) Taylor saw
Pake as a pragmatic administrator capable of cutting through red tape
to assist a program and a researcher he valued highly. They obviously
could have had no inkling of how, within a few short years, their lives
would intertwine as colleagues and adversaries.

Before the two would have a chance to meet again Taylor's capacious
net would come to embrace areas of computer research that barely
existed when ARPA delivered its lifesaving shot to Wes Clark's project.
At ARPA he funded the country's first full-fledged graduate degree
programs in computer science at Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, and
MIT. Some fields of study virtually owed their existence to his largesse.
Among them was computer graphics, which came to life at the Univer­sity of Utah when Dave Evans, a devout Mormon who had led the
Genie team building the time-sharing SDS 940 at UC Berkeley, called
Taylor to say his alma mater had invited him to return to Salt Lake to
start a computer program. How about an ARPA project, he asked, to
get it going?

Computer graphics was then attracting almost no one's attention, for
the simple reason that most computers lacked visual displays of any kind.
If Evans was willing to start such a program in the backwater of Utah,
where it could develop in pristine isolation from the traditionalist think­ing elsewhere, Taylor was all for it. The venture turned out better than
anyone could have expected. The program Taylor funded partially as a
personal experiment and partially as a favor to an old friend evolved into
a world leader in computer graphics research.

His most enduring legacy, however, was not a university program but
a leap of intuition that tied together everything else he had done. This
was the ARPANET, the precursor of today's Internet.

Taylor's original model of a nationwide computer network grew out of
his observation that time-sharing was starting to promote the formation
of a sort of nationwide computing brotherhood (at this time very few
members were women)
.
Whether they were at MIT, Stanford, or UCLA,
researchers were all looking for answers to the same general questions.
"These people began to know one another, share a lot of information, and
ask of one another, 'How do I use dais? Where do I find that?'
"
Taylor
recalled. "It was really phenomenal to see this computer become a
medium that stimulated the formation of a human community."

There was still a long way to go before reaching that ideal, however.
The community was less like a nation than a swarm of tribal hamlets,
often mutually unintelligible or even mutually hostile. Design differ­ences among their machines kept many groups digitally isolated from
the others. The risk was that each institution would develop its own
unique and insular culture, like related species of birds evolving inde­pendently on islands in a vast uncharted sea. Pondering how to bind
them into a larger whole, Taylor sought a way for all groups to interact
via their computers, each island community enjoying constant access
to the others' machines as though they all lived on one contiguous vir­tual continent.